Four Changes in Gopalpur: Labelling Social Change Correctly

(i) Girls going to college - modernisation. Modernisation in Srinivas's sense involves achievement, mobility and the use of rational-legal institutions rather than ascription. A bus and a bridge are infrastructure, but the change they enable is educational mobility, which is not automatically western. The self-help group belongs here too, as an institutional form based on voluntary membership and accounting.

(ii) Sacred thread and 'Kshatriya' - sanskritisation. This is the textbook case: a group improving its position in the local hierarchy by adopting the ritual and ideological style of the twice-born. Note that a Koch family moving towards Kshatriya status is also a tribe-to-caste transition, which sanskritisation describes but does not fully explain.

(iii) Jeans, T-shirts, DJ - westernisation. Srinivas's category covers changes in technology, dress, food and values flowing from colonial and post-colonial contact. The elders' word 'civilised' is itself evidence: the new practice carries a valuation of superior style, which is what distinguishes westernisation from mere change.

(iv) River offering abandoned - secularisation, and the weakest fit. Secularisation properly means the declining social significance of religious obligation, or the separation of spheres. Here belief may be entirely intact; what collapsed was the material occasion (the boat crossing) once the embankment changed the river. Calling this secularisation stretches the term. 'Ritual attrition following technological change' describes it better. The weakest label is therefore (iv), and the reason is that the cause is infrastructural, not ideological.

It is both, and the two descriptions are not rivals - but the conflict perspective exposes what the polite version hides.

As social control, the ban is a textbook informal sanction: the village meeting defines a norm, and reputation, gossip and exclusion enforce it. Durkheim would say the meeting is doing what communities do - reaffirming a collective sentiment through a rule and a threatened penalty, and the intensity of the sentiment tells us more about the elders than about the DJ.

As cultural preservation, the elders have a real point: Bihu's ensemble is not just music, it is a structure of participation in which young people learn roles and elders hold authority.

What conflict theory adds:

• Generational power. The dhol-and-pepa arrangement places prestige with elders who know the repertoire; the DJ places prestige with young men who have cash and town contacts. The 'tradition' argument is also a claim to authority.
• Invented tradition. Bihu performance has changed repeatedly; the sacred-thread family in (ii) shows that even ritual is constantly being remade. The elders' 'traditional' Bihu is a snapshot they happen to control.
• Market and class. Hiring a DJ costs money and redistributes expenditure towards town traders; a ban protects not only custom but the village's own economy of performance.

A defensible judgement: the meeting is legitimate as a forum, but the ban will hold only if the elders can show that the DJ does not simply replace one monopoly with another. Rules that cannot be enforced by consent erode the authority that made them.

Change (ii) is the one that directly touches rank; the others work on it indirectly, and the difference matters.

College education (i) alters class position: a graduate daughter may earn, marry into a salaried household and move to town. But class mobility does not by itself change a status order, as the Bhogpur case shows; it can coexist with caste for generations.

Dress and music (iii) alter consumption and generational style, not the evaluative hierarchy of groups.

Ritual attrition (iv) changes religious practice, not the ranking of castes.

Change (ii) is different because it is an explicit claim about relative rank: the family is asserting a Kshatriya identity, which is a positional claim within the hierarchy. Two consequences follow. First, positional claims invite counter-claims - other groups will dispute the family's history and its right to a Brahmin priest - and such disputes are the visible working of the caste order. Second, the claim opens the door to organised politics: census categories, Scheduled Tribe status demands and caste associations, which may alter the group's relation to the state rather than only to its neighbours.

So the answer is (ii), with a caveat worth stating: it alters the negotiation of rank more immediately than it abolishes rank. Education (i) may, over two generations, do more to loosen the order than any single ritual claim - but it will do so slowly, and probably through marriage choices, which is where castes are actually reproduced.